ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, wife of ailing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani, has relinquished her post as head of the party’s main bureau in Sulaimani, following the PUK’s poor showing in last month’s parliamentary elections.
After the PUK’s poor performance in the September 21 polls for Kurdistan’s 111-seat parliament, party leaders vowed that changes would take place inside the party.
“I apologize for not being able to serve you as needed or be your source of hope,” she said in a statement Monday, published on the bureau’s website.
Ahmed, who is known as Hero Khan, said that she left her post to rejoin the party’s political bureau. Her husband, who is also Iraq’s president, suffered a stroke in December and has since been under medical care in Germany.
“I tried hard to undo some of the injustices, particularly property ownership issues, public services, workers, employees, students and other sections of society,” Ahmed said in the statement.
She directed some of the blame at the Kurdish government for her inability to address people’s grievances, saying, “The solution to many of those issues lay with the government and we tried to mediate between the government and people, but in most cases all we got was promises and the problems remained unsolved.”
With 95 percent of the votes from the polls counted, the Election Commission revealed last weekend that PUK won 18 percent of the votes, thus losing its status as Kurdistan’s second-largest party.
That position is now held by the Change Movement (Gorran), which has won 24 percent of the counted votes.
PUK officials have announced they intend to hold a plenary party meeting in which they expect to reshuffle many leadership posts.
Ahmed’s resignation as head of the PUK Sulaimani bureau coincided with a high-level meeting of senior PUK officials who gathered to study the causes of their failure at the election.
The leaders presented three proposals for change: A speedy change in the party’s organizations, holding a plenum, and looking to fix party defects through reform and change.
The earliest call for changes in PUK policies came from its Deputy Secretary Barham Salih, who hours after the elections said, “We must pay attention to this message and not block our ears.”
“In light of the final results it (PUK) will revisit its own policies and style of work,” Salih wrote on his Facebook page.
“We should do a grassroots reassessment of our policies and hope that people will give us back their trust in the next election,” he added.
Late on Monday, a well-placed source within the PUK told Rudaw that Omar Fatah, a senior PUK leader who once served as prime minister, has decided to resign from his post as head of the political bureau. The source said that Fatah is planning to hand in his resignation at the party’s next plenum.
